Page 46 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Sleep,” he breathes, mouth against my temple.
“Don’t go,” I murmur.
“I couldn’t if I tried,” he answers, and the way his arm tightens at my back says a thousand impolite, unrepeatable, necessary things.
The last thing I hear is CynJyn humming off-key through the thin wall, a lullaby for sinners. The last thing I feel is Rayek’s chest rise and fall under my cheek, steady as a heartbeat I borrowed. The last thing I know is a simple dangerous fact: I am whole.
CHAPTER 10
RAYEK
Iwake to warmth, weight, and the softest sound in the universe: her breath catching and smoothing again against my chest. The cabin is dim, emergency strips a low hush along the floor, the air perfumed with leather, ion, and the citrus cleaner this ridiculous ceremonial bird insists on exhaling. Star is tangled in the sheets like the aftermath of a good storm, hair a red spill over my shoulder, lips parted, bruises already changing color at the edges. I count the rise and fall once, twice, until the part of me built for war starts to relax into a shape that feels almost like sleep.
Almost.
Reality sits down at the edge of the bed and taps my horn with a finger. I ease my arm out from under her with the kind of care I have only ever used for explosives and small animals, tuck the sheet higher over her shoulder, and stand. My body inventories itself automatically: ribs sore, forearm scored where bone spurs tried to write their names on me, a new bruise under the left clavicle shaped like the Bloodseeker’s temper. All acceptable. I dress without noise, check the knife by habit, and palm the cabin door open.
CynJyn is where I expect her: barefoot in the cockpit with her boots abandoned under the copilot’s chair, one knee up, hair in a mess that looks deliberate, sipping something rude out of a metal mug while the stars smear into thin threads around us.
“You look different,” she says without turning. “Taller. Shinier. Like somebody polished your soul.”
“Good morning,” I answer, deadpan.
“It is, isn’t it?” She swivels, grins, and aims the mug at me. “Want a sip? It tastes like a battery fell in love with coffee.”
“I have survived worse,” I say, taking it. The drink bites. I let it. “Status.”
“Don’t you want to talk about your feelings first?” she asks, shameless. “We can braid each other’s hair.”
“Status,” I repeat, and hand the mug back.
She sighs theatrically and spins to the console. “Okay, Commander Romance. Shields are behaving like they weren’t just smacked with a crowbar. I had to baby the port relay with a prayer and a slap, but it decided to live. Engines want to be dramatic, so I told them the alternative is drifting and dying. They’re purring now. The bow camera is sulking; I’m letting it. Fuel at sixty-eight percent if we don’t do anything outrageous, forty-nine if we do. And congrats: we’re not exploding.”
“Any friends,” I ask. “Any angry family.”
“I turned off our tendency to broadcast our sins,” she says, fingers flicking across a series of toggles with affectionate contempt. “No transponder. No house crest. Our ceremonial identity is in a box under the bed where it belongs. I’ve got us skirting the ice fringe of the next system and then we’re hopping a dirty corridor I stole off a salvage guild. It gets us into Alliance lanes without giving anyone who loves paperwork an aneurysm.”
“Comms?”
“Radio silence,” she sings. “But I built us a nicer lie. When we hit the first beacon that isn’t owned by a pirate with a hobby, I can throw a burst packet at an IHC patrol with our ‘help we are small and polite’ face on it, plus a copy of the Bloodseeker’s heat signature, partial engine telemetry, and Kren’s bead chatter. You like bounties, Daddy War.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Fine. Daddy Knife.”
“CynJyn.”
She wiggles her eyebrows and then sobers. “Seriously—there’s a bounty on Stormhammer hull IDs and telemetry, right? Alliance pays better if you show work and don’t just point at a fire and say ‘We did that with our minds.’”
“There is,” I say. “They like proof. Timelines. Names.”
“You got names?”
“I have a dead man’s,” I say, tapping my jaw where the bead sits. “I have his supervisor’s voice. I have a hull that screamed when it died. It will do.”
“And you have a girl sleeping in the other room,” she says, voice dipped softer, “so let’s maybe stack as many shields between us and Brozen’s bad mood as possible.”
“Agreed.”
